As business owners, we all sort of intuitively know that our pursuit of learning and knowledge should never end. Yet, why is it that when our formal education ends, we can fall into an all too comfortable routine in business, choosing to do what "everyone in business" has always been doing? Why do some of us choose to stop learning about what is new and innovative in the world of business and technology? Why is it we allow our inate sense of curiosity and creativity to wither into a faint memory?
We let it happen for a lot of reasons. Perhaps we have the sense that there are just too few hours in the day to fit in a business seminar or webinar or a great book on marketing or motivation. Perhaps it seems like it is just too much trouble to do something in a different way, because what we are doing still seems to work perfectly well and our customers seem to be okay with what we are doing for them. After awhile, maybe we find it is just a little scary to venture outside of our ingrained comfort zone. No matter why this happens, when it does we begin to lose our competitive edge and we are putting the future of the companies we have grown at risk.
For a moment, picture the scenario I am about to describe. In a small town, far off the beaten path and long since bypassed by the interstate, a man in his 60's sits on the front porch of an aging house, in a rocking chair and looks out on a road that no longer goes anywhere. The road just sort of dead-ends around the bend. The man's town died a long time and he just stuck around a little too long. Time and the world had long since passed him by and moved on.
I could have been the first person to ask, "What is wrong with this picture? How could he let that happen to himself?" But I won't go there. Why? Because I am the owner of a small business and until six or seven months ago I was behaving much like this old man. I was running my business in pretty much the same way as I had for fifteen years. Why fix it? Nothing seemed to be really broken about my business model, so why fix it? Think about it. How many of you have made no substantial changes to the way you do business since you opened your doors?
Over the last twenty years, the business landscape and the technologies we use have been transformed beyond recognition. The ways we communicate with our suppliers and our customers has been revolutionized. Today we utilize amazing new technologies to produce goods and services, to distribute them and to collect and manipulate business data. And yet, to some extent, a lot of us are still resistant to learning about and utilizing the latest and newest strategies and tools at our disposal. That this is so simply defies logic.
Make no mistake. The Gen-Xers and the Gen-Yers are joining us in the business community. They take this new amazing business environment for granted. Doing business in this new way is the only way they have ever known to do business. So, without giving it a second thought, they are taking full advantage of all these new tools and strategies to achieve amazing levels of success. If those of us who have been around for awhile are going to survive and thrive in this new world, we are going to have to make a paradigm shift in our thinking and begin to embrace these new ideas and tools.
For the record, the phrase, a "paradigm shift" is one of those $10 notions which we need to know and understand. A paradigm shift is ".[a] radical change in thinking from an accepted point of view to a new belief.." [Definition courtesy of Google].
Attorneys have always been required to complete a certain number of hours in continuing education each year. The same obligation applies to physicians, paramedics and firemen. For them, the learning experience has never ended. Why should it be any different for business people, whether your companies are small or big?
In Houston, in any given week, there are numerous opportunities to learn about marketing, opening a business, communicating effectively with clients, insuring that your IT systems are secure and keeping up with the legal/tax/financial issues that are currently confronting businesses in Houston and Texas. Whether it is through SCORE or UH SBDC or HNN or Constant Contact... or any one of thousands of web sites...there are a thousand opportunities to restart the ongoing learning experience that should be a fixed part of running and growing your company. And the best part of all this is that many of these educational opportunities are absolutely free or cost only a nominal amount.
The bottom line: for us as business men and women, learning should never end. Attending a seminar, picking up on a webinar, regularly reading business journals, reading a book on business or listening to a motivational cd/dvd, should just be looked upon as a normal and critical activity in running our companies. Think of every hour we spend on learning about the evolving world of business as an investment in the future of our company and of our business community.
Through continuing education, we grow and expand our understanding of what it means to be a great CEO of our own company.
Let your daily mantra become, "Learning never ends. "
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